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Space

Discovery of binary stars the first step in creating "movie of the universe"

A world-first discovery of binary stars could be the first step in building a more complete picture of how our galaxy formed, according to astronomers from The Australian National University (ANU). The discovery is part of an ambitious 10-year program to scan the entire southern sky every few nights. The study's lead author, ANU researcher Dr Giacomo Cordoni, said the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) will build an extraordinary “movie of the universe". “This survey—run from ...

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Space

Calm red brocket deer can learn to "Come" and other commands - but the flightiest, most restless individuals struggle

Calm red brocket deer can learn to "Come" and other commands - but the flightiest, most restless individuals struggle Article URL: http://plos.io/46CkgPw Article title: Assessing the impact of the reactivity of red brocket deer (Mazama americana) on training efficiency Author countries: Brazil Funding: This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior -Brasil (CAPES) – Finance Code 001.The founders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. ...

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Space

Composing crews for Mars missions

Simulation results highlight how team composition shapes stress, health, performance, and cohesion in long-duration space missions, according to a study published October 8, 2025, in the open-access journal PLOS One by Iser Pena and Hao Chen of the Stevens Institute of Technology, U.S. In particular, team diversity in personality traits may contribute to greater resilience under extended isolation and operational load. Missions to Mars are expected to last up to three years, putting astronauts at risk of cumulative stress resulting ...

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Space

Dancing dust devils trace raging winds on Mars

Combing through 20 years of images from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter spacecraft, scientists have tracked 1039 tornado-like whirlwinds to reveal how dust is lifted into the air and swept around Mars’s surface. Published on Wednesday 8 October in Science Advances, their findings – including that the strongest winds on Mars blow much faster than we thought – give us a much clearer picture of the Red Planet’s weather and climate. And with these ‘dust devils’ collected into a single public catalogue, this research is just the beginning. Besides pure science, it will be useful for ...

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Space

Raging winds on Mars

Despite the very thin Martian atmosphere, there are also winds on Mars that are central to the climate and the distribution of dust. The wind movements and the whirling up of dust also create so-called dust devils, rotating columns of dust and air that move across the surface. In images of Mars, the wind itself is invisible, but dust devils are clearly visible. Due to their movement, they are valuable indicators for researchers to determine the otherwise invisible winds. A new study led by Dr. Valentin Bickel from the Center for Space and Habitability at the University of Bern shows that the dust devils and the winds that surround ...

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Space

Moon's biggest impact crater made a radioactive splash

When astronauts land near the moon's south pole as part of NASA's Artemis program in a few years, they likely will find themselves in an unexpected treasure trove of clues that could help scientists better understand how Earth's only natural satellite came to be. That's according to a new study led by Jeffrey Andrews-Hanna, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona. Published on Oct. 8 in the journal Nature, the paper also provides a snapshot of the moon's tumultuous past that could help explain longstanding puzzles such as why the moon's crater-riddled far side is so dramatically different from its smooth ...

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Space

Webb Telescope unveils doomed star hidden in dust

A Northwestern University-led team of astronomers has captured the most detailed glimpse yet of a doomed star before it exploded. Using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the international team identified a supernova’s source star, or progenitor, at mid-infrared wavelengths for the first time. These observations — combined with archival images from the Hubble Space Telescope — revealed the explosion came from a massive red supergiant star, cloaked in an unexpected shroud of dust. The discovery may help solve the decades-old mystery of why massive red supergiants rarely explode. Afterall, theoretical models predict red ...

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Space

New approach to gravitational wave detection opens the Milli-Hz Frontier

Scientists have unveiled a new approach to detecting gravitational waves in the milli-Hertz frequency range, providing access to astrophysical and cosmological phenomena that are not detectable with current instruments. Gravitational waves—ripples in spacetime predicted by Einstein—have been observed at high frequencies by ground-based interferometers such as LIGO and Virgo, and at ultra-low frequencies by pulsar timing arrays. However, the mid-band range has remained a scientific blind spot. Developed by researchers at the Universities of Birmingham and Sussex, the new detector concept uses cutting-edge optical cavity and atomic clock technologies ...

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Space

Six billion tonnes a second: Rogue planet found growing at record rate

Astronomers have identified an enormous ‘growth spurt’ in a so-called rogue planet. Unlike the planets in our Solar System, these objects do not orbit stars, free-floating on their own instead. The new observations, made with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), reveal that this free-floating planet is eating up gas and dust from its surroundings at a rate of six billion tonnes a second. This is the strongest growth rate ever recorded for a rogue planet, or a planet of any kind, providing valuable insights into how they form and grow. “People may think ...

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Space

Young rogue planet displays record-breaking ‘growth spurt’

A young rogue planet about 620 light-years away from Earth has experienced a record-breaking “growth spurt,” hoovering up some six billion tons of gas and dust each second over a couple of months. A team of international researchers have explored changes in the planet’s growth and immediate surroundings. The observations provide insight into how rogue planets—free-floating planetary-mass objects that do not orbit stars—behave and grow in their infancy. “We’ve caught this newborn rogue planet in the act of gobbling ...

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Space

New research shows global economy doubles, but poverty persists and planetary damage deepens

A new study published in Nature shows that as the global economy more than doubled between 2000 and 2022, it still left billions of people without life’s essentials, while rapidly pushing Earth’s life-supporting systems further beyond safe limits. For the first time, researchers have created an annual global dashboard that tracks 21st century trends in social shortfall and ecological overshoot, and reveals the extent to which wealthy countries drive most of the overshoot while poorer countries bear the brunt of deprivation. The co-authors of the study, ...

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Space

ESA's Gaia telescope discovers our galaxy’s great wave

Our Milky Way galaxy never sits still: it rotates and wobbles. And now, data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope reveal that our galaxy also has a giant wave rippling outwards from its centre. We’ve known for about a hundred years that the galaxy’s stars rotate around its centre, and Gaia has measured their speeds and motions. Since the 1950s, we've known that the Milky Way's disc is warped. Then in 2020 Gaia discovered that this disc wobbles over time, similarly to the motion of a spinning top. And now it has become clear that a great wave ...

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Space

Far side of the moon may be colder than the near side

The interior of the mysterious far side of the moon may be colder than the side constantly facing Earth, suggests a new analysis of rock samples co-led by a UCL (University College London) and Peking University researcher. The study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, looked at fragments of rock and soil scooped up by China’s Chang’e 6 spacecraft last year from a vast crater on the far side of the moon. The research team confirmed previous findings that the rock sample was about 2.8 billion years old, and analysed the chemical make-up of its minerals to estimate ...

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Space

Electric space heating, appliances reduce US residential energy consumption

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Electric space heating systems and appliances like water heaters can help American homeowners reduce their energy use, and possibly their utility bills, according to a team led by researchers at Penn State. The researchers set out to identify the most important factors driving U.S. on-site residential energy consumption, which the team said accounts for approximately 21% of primary energy consumption in the country and is more complex than commercial energy use. They found that electric heating systems like heat pumps, compared to systems that rely on natural gas and oil, had the largest impact on reducing on-site energy ...

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Space

Physicists tighten the net on elusive dark matter

Determining the nature of dark matter, the invisible substance that makes up most of the mass in our universe, is one of the greatest puzzles in physics. New results from the world’s most sensitive dark matter detector, LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ), have narrowed down the possibilities for one of the leading dark matter candidates: weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). “While we always hope to discover a new particle, it is important for particle physics that we are able to set bounds on what the dark matter might actually be,” said UC Santa Barbara experimental ...

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Space

Laboratory breakthrough recreating star formation mechanism wins prestigious John Dawson Award

Groundbreaking scientific findings on how swirling matter can form stars, planets and supermassive black holes earned a team of scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and Princeton University the 2025 John Dawson Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research from the American Physical Society (APS). The winning team includes Fatima Ebrahimi, Erik Gilson, Hantao Ji and Yin Wang, as well as Princeton University’s Jeremy ...

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Space

UMass researchers help ID new mineral on Mars, providing insight on the Red Planet’s potential to have supported life

AMHERST, Mass. — Researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst are part of a team that has identified a unique mineral on Mars, described in Nature Communications. Named ferric hydroxysulfate, the mineral provides clues about the Martian environment and history of the planet, including the possibility of former lava, ash or hydrothermal activity. Mars gets its trademark red hue from the abundance of iron on its surface, but that’s just what can be seen with the naked eye. The various minerals on ...

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Space

New adaptive optics to support gravitational-wave discoveries

RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- Gravitational-wave detection technology is poised to make a big leap forward thanks to an instrumentation advance led by physicist Jonathan Richardson of the University of California, Riverside. A paper detailing the invention, published in the journal Optica, reports the successful development and testing of FROSTI, a full-scale prototype for controlling laser wavefronts at extreme power levels inside the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO. LIGO is ...

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Space

Northern Lights feature in today’s weather report… from a rogue planet

Strong Northern Lights-like activity is the standout feature of today’s weather report, which is coming at you from a strange, extrasolar world, instead of a standard TV studio. That is thanks to astronomers from Trinity College Dublin, who used the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope to take a close look at the weather of a toasty nearby rogue planet, SIMP-0136. The exquisite sensitivity of the instruments on board the space-based telescope enabled the team to see minute changes in brightness of the planet as it rotated, which were used to track changes in temperature, cloud cover and chemistry. Surprisingly, ...

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Space

Motion of planet-forming spirals captured on video

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has captured the motion of spirals of dust around a young star and shown that the winding motion of the spiral pattern is conducive to planet formation. This provides new evidence for planet formation around this young star. The results could have implications for other young stars as well. Observations have revealed a spiral pattern in the disk of gas and dust around the young star IM Lup located 515 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Lupus. Spiral patterns are thought to be one of the signs that a new planet will form soon, but ...

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Space

Water flowed on ancient asteroid

A team of researchers, including those at the University of Tokyo, discovered that liquid water once flowed on the asteroid that spawned near-Earth asteroid Ryugu more than a billion years after it first formed. The finding, based on tiny rock fragments returned by the Hayabusa2 spacecraft of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), overturns long-held assumptions that water activity on asteroids only occurred in the earliest moments of solar system history. This could impact models which include the formation of the Earth. We have a relatively good ...

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Space

Can Hayabusa2 touchdown? New study reveals space mission’s target asteroid is tinier and faster than thought

Astronomers have used observatories around the world, including the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), to study the asteroid 1998 KY26, revealing it to be almost three times smaller and spinning much faster than previously thought. The asteroid is the 2031 target for Japan’s Hayabusa2 extended mission. The new observations offer key information for the mission’s operations at the asteroid, just six years out from the spacecraft’s encounter with 1998 KY26. “We found that the reality of the object is completely different from what it was previously described as,” says ...

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Space

Exoplanets are not water worlds

An exoplanet orbiting a dwarf star 124 light-years from Earth made headlines around the world in April 2025. Researchers at the University of Cambridge reported that planet K2-18b could be a marine world with a deep, global ocean teeming with life. However, a study now shows that so-called sub-Neptunes such as K2-18b are highly unlikely to be worlds dominated by water and that conditions there are far from conducive to life. “Water on planets is much more limited than previously believed,” notes ...

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Space

Cosmic crime scene: White dwarf found devouring Pluto-like icy world

University of Warwick astronomers have uncovered the chemical fingerprint of a frozen, water-rich planetary fragment being consumed by a white dwarf star outside our Solar System. In our Solar System, it is thought that comets and icy planetesimals (small solid objects in space) were responsible for delivering water to Earth. The existence of these icy objects is a requirement for the development of life on other worlds, but it is incredibly difficult to identify them outside our Solar System as icy objects are small, faint and require chemical In ...

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Space

SwRI-built instruments to monitor, provide advanced warning of space weather events

SAN ANTONIO — September 17, 2025 — Two instruments developed by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) are integrated into a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellite set to launch into space as a rideshare on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket no earlier than Sept. 23, 2025. The SwRI-built Solar Wind Plasma Sensor (SWiPS) and Space Weather Follow-On Magnetometer (SWFO-MAG) are two of four instruments integrated into NOAA’s Space Weather Follow-On Lagrange 1 (SWFO-L1) satellite. ...

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